I'm not sure if the digitally capable will approve of the View-Master, a simple little plastic device used by generations of children to look at 3-D colour pictures, happily amazed. But, however, anyone might look down on such a jolly little machine today, the View-Master is one good reason the American product designer, Charles "Chuck" Harrison [b 1931] won the Cooper Hewitt's 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Harrison's classic "View-Master" – the one that seems to have appeared in every Christmas catalogue for children's toys that appeared in the west from the late 1950s – was not the first View-Master. According to the Wikipedia entry on the subject, it was invented by Harold Graves, a postcard maker, and William Gruber, an organ maker and keen photographer for Sawyer's Photo Services in the US, and was first shown to the public at the 1939 New York World's Fair; the entry goes on to say that the "US military recognised the potential for using View-Master products for personnel training, purchasing 100,000 viewers and nearly 6 million reels between 1942 and the end of the second world war". Intriguing stuff, but can anyone tell me what the military actually watched through the lenses of their stereoscopic View-Masters?

The version many of us might still know is the Model F of 1958 designed by Chuck Harrison and made of Bakelite until this gave way to lightweight red and white plastic four years later. I don't think you can buy Harrison's classic model today; I was looking at some toys in LA recently and the only View-Masters I could find, made by Fisher-Price today, were in the shape of tigers, frogs, dogs and Santa Claus. They all come complete with sound to accompany the images – mostly of Disney films, it seemed – and cost about four bucks, which, if nothing else, is certainly good value.

Harrison, though, is one of those designers who will always be remembered for shaping a toy that generations of children dreamed of getting for birthdays and especially, I'm not sure why, Christmas. It was just one of those things like Meccano, those little red record-players [who made those? I'm not thinking of Dansettes, which were for teenagers], Mamod steam engines, Waddington board games that children of the 50s, 60s and into the early 70s clearly wanted very much indeed.

Harrison, an industrial designer at Sears, Roebuck and Company for more than 30 years, produced at least 750 designs for pretty much any gadget you might care for or need in the home from radios and hairdryers to sewing machines, power tools, toasters and – his favourite – the first plastic rubbish bins. "No more clang-clang of metal before breakfast", he says. He currently teaches design at Columbia College, Chicago.

One of the most interesting things about this prolific designer, is that he is an African-American; very few famous American designers are black and Harrison was one of the very first, although aside from McKinley Thompson, a General Motors car designer in the 1950s and George Olden who directed on-air graphics for CBS in the 1940s, can anyone think of anyone else?

Harrison's ascent from his birthplace in Shreveport, Louisiana to his becoming the first African American executive at Sears, Roebuck and Co, was a long but not altogether slow one. Talent will out, and he was in an executive position by the age of 30. His story is told, with plenty of enjoyable illustrations, in his biography A Life's Design.

Of his happily homespun approach to design, Harrison writes: "I tried to make things appear as if they just belong." They did, although like so many department stores that once boasted their own successful in-house design teams, Sears, Roebuck and Co went the way of buying in big-name "brands" instead from the early 1990s. Their own designers were pensioned off.

But, collectively, we kept on looking through Harrison's View-Masters for some years to come. I've just dug through a box and found mine. Hmm. Now what shall I watch? Yogi Bear, Mickey Mouse or the Flintstones?